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Thursday, April 9, 2015

An Introduction to Near-Insanity

Who's that good lookin' guy?

Hello all and welcome to a small glimpse into the mind of Ryan Howard. Who is Ryan Howard? Well, there's Ryan Howard the baseball player. Ryan Howard is also a character on The Office. However, I am none of those Ryan Howards. I'm a massive comic book nerd who's trying to make it in the world of acting.

In my spare time, I'm Batman

This is a collection of writings that I did in my freshman year of college for my UWRIT 1103 class. The main body of my work revolved around my inquiry topic which was on comic books and their impact on culture. Comic books are a huge part of who I am. As you can see from the picture on the right side of the screen, I'm a pretty big Batman fan and a collector of comics (look really closely at my wall in the background). I even have an entire YouTube channel dedicated to comic book movies (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrZqyHuD9z12sz7D4MUTghA) In addition to being a comic book nerd, I'm also a history and philosophy buff (my major and minor respectively). One thing we historians live and die by is primary resource documents. Without them, there would be no history text books, biographies or specials on TV. Without primary sources, history would be...well, history (ba dum tss!). In my various writings on this topic, I argue that comic books can serve as primary resource documents...stop laughing, I'm completely serious! Wait, come back! I promise I have some kind of ground to stand on! Okay, for those of you willing to hear me out, obviously comics can't verify whether or not an event happened or what actually transpired at said event (For example I don't think Booster Gold or Batman ever saved Ronald Reagan from assassins).

Oh yea, this happened

However, comics do tend to be perfect reflections of what the culture (or counter-culture) was thinking and feeling at the time the comic was written. This is where philosophy comes in as I use what I find in the comics to examine the thoughts and feelings of the people of a certain time. What's interesting about comics is that they not only give you words to ponder, but pictures to deconstruct and examine. A simple change in artistic style can indicate a lot of changed hearts and minds. I don't want to give too much away, otherwise you'll skim this first page and then leave without reading the rest of my work. So if I've sufficiently interested you, please read the works under my inquiry topic tab. while you're at it, check out my writing process to see how a lot of this came to be. Now there's more than just stuff about comics on here. I included a couple journal entries from my Writer's Journal and a few other works from some other classes. Happy reading and, in the immortal words of comic book legend Stan Lee "Excelsior true believers!"